


flowers, i remember

by frenchforbird



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-27 17:17:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20049697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frenchforbird/pseuds/frenchforbird
Summary: happy endings take longer than a single season





	flowers, i remember

“Step into my office,” Hades says. He’s drinking from a crystal clear glass, and Eurydice can see a second one in his other hand. It’s only because she smells whiskey that she doesn’t argue. She drops her pickaxe on the ground and pretends that the workers aren’t staring as she goes. The nape of her neck burns.

Persephone has been gone a month; Orpheus, almost two. Hades hands her the other glass and gestures for her to sit in a chair covered in a thin layer of dust. 

“Maybe Persephone would like this place better if it was cleaner.” She sits and crosses her legs, swirls the whiskey in the glass, takes a long swig as she stares the god down. It isn’t her first time in his office. It won’t be her last, either. He pretends his invitations to share booze and stories are one-time offers, but he always comes back to her corner of the mine. He pulls her out of the monotonous life she has thrown herself into and, in return, she throws salt into his wounds.

They are both missing someone they love.

“Tell me about the surface,” he says. He collapses into his own chair with Atlas’s weight on his shoulders. It is times like these Eurydice considers sympathy. “Tell me about the trees.”

“Did you know that some trees stay green through winter?” It is not a burden to speak of the surface. Not with alcohol on her breath. “They’re called Evergreens. They’re tall and almost impossible to climb. They don’t have leaves, they have needles that poke at the skin and leave red lines that sting when touched. But the needles are green, and they stay green until they fall off the tree and are trampled underfoot.”

“Why do they call Orpheus the poet?” Hades asks, meaning it as a joke. “I can’t imagine one of these Evergreens ever being beautiful, and yet you make them so.”

Eurydice lets the grief consume her as tears burn in her eyes. She didn’t think Evergreens were beautiful, either, not until she was laying under one with Orpheus and he sang her a song. He was always good at singing songs. This one was about a woman waiting for her wife to return from war. She was afraid her wife would lose her way, and so she stood at the crossroads until she turned into a tree. She was afraid her wife would not recognize her under the branches, and so she stretched herself tall above the rest. She was afraid her wife would not find her in the winter snow, and so she held onto her leaves until they shrunk to the size of needles and never lost their color.

Eurydice fell asleep before Orpheus revealed if the wife returned or not. Now, sitting in the dim light of Hadestown, she was glad she did not know the answer.

* * *

“I can see you’re blinded by the sadness of it all,” Persephone says. She pours more wine into Eurydice’s cup. “You can’t forget what you’ve lost.”

“It’s only been a year,” Eurydice replies. “Give me some time and I’m sure I’ll do it.”

She doesn’t like the look Persephone gives her. It isn’t that she doesn’t want to remember Orpheus, and the song he sang. It would be easier if she didn’t want that. She wants to forget the pain she feels every time she thinks of his smile. But to forget the pain is to forget its begetter, and this leads Eurydice to Persephone’s imports from up top every night of the week.

“You think you’re the only one here separated from a lover?” Persephone gestures down from her balcony to the distant workers of the night shift. Their lights flicker, the heartbeat of Hadestown. “Don’t be selfish, Eurydice.”

* * *

“It’s almost spring,” Hades says. 

“That it is,” Persephone answers. “Pass the salt?”

Eurydice doesn’t know why she’s here. She can guess, the same way she can guess why Hades calls her into his office every winter, or why Persephone wastes good wine on her, but she’ll never know the answer.

She watches the gods eat their dinner while barely touching her own. No one needs to eat in Hadestown, and she still remembers the hunger that led her here. She wonders where the steak came from. It’s bright red against the plain white plates Hades dug out of a cupboard shortly after she arrived.

Persephone will leave in less than a week. She’s already promised to tell Orpheus that Eurydice loves him, just as she has promised for the last four years, but it’s a promise that comes with a damning caveat: if she can find him.

“Do you not like the steak?” There is genuine concern in Hades’s voice. Eurydice meets his cobalt eyes and smiles, shaking her head. There are better times to be sad. 

Persephone finishes off the wine bottle without standing to get another. For once, she is content to sit and talk with her husband. They almost forget that Eurydice is there, but she finds she doesn’t mind. She is content to sit in the thrumming silence and dream about an autumn when Persephone brings back four sweet words from Orpheus’s lips.

* * *

“We raise our cups to Orpheus,” the worker says. He’s mining a shoulder’s length away from Eurydice, and at first she does not realize he’s talking to her.

“It’s been six years.” Eurydice is tired. She is tired of remembering the life she lost. It was her choice to take the train to Hadestown, but it was Orpheus’s choice to turn around and leave her here. She does not blame her poet. She loves him. The pain still clings to her skin.

“If it weren’t for him, Hadestown would be the same.”

“What are you talking about?” 

The worker leans his pickaxe against the wall straightens to his full height. It’s intimidating, and Eurydice finds herself less skeptical of whatever he decides to say next.

“Haven’t you noticed?” He sighs. She’s failed a test of some sort. “The work day starts later, ends earlier, and his eyes don’t follow our every move. He brings down cases of wine each autumn and smiles when no one is looking.”

The worker takes his pickaxe and chips away at the stone needed to build the wall. Eurydice stares at the pickaxe in her hand and remembers the blueprints she had seen on Hades’s desk last week. A door. What does Hades want with doors, she wonders.

* * *

“Flowers,” Eurydice says. “I remember flowers.”

Hades stares at her over the rim of a glass filled with plain water. She doesn’t remember when she stopped caring whether or not she was being bribed with alcohol to talk to Hades during the summer. 

He had asked her what she remembered of the surface, and she hadn’t answered for a long time. She didn’t know what she really remembered anymore. It was easy to confuse dreams for memories. Songs for truth.

“In the summer-- fields and fields of flowers.” She smiles at him. She wishes she could give Hades more of what he is looking for. The feeling of petals on bare skin, the pain of a rose’s thorn, the sweet taste of dandelion wine. 

“What color?” He asks, as if there is just one.

“Red.” Eurydice remembers the red flower in Orpheus’s hands, the way the earth sang back to him. “Some of them are red.”

“Persephone wants to plant a garden,” Hades announces. He stares at an envelope on his desk. There’s no name written on the dingy paper, no clue of who it is for.

“You should let her,” Eurydice says, unable to ignore the desire to see a real flower again.

“Flowers are beautiful things, aren’t they?” He muses over a long-gone memory; a pauper’s minor chord lifting the petals of a red bloom clutched in his hand. 

“Until they rot.” 

Eurydice has long since given up arguing with Hades. She doesn’t say that to throw salt in his wounds-- they’ve long since healed, anyways. She sees the way he smiles at Persephone. The last time she came home for winter, he had forgotten she was even coming, lost in the bliss of waiting for her. 

Hades stares at her, long and hard, before sliding the envelope across the table, just in reach of her dirty fingers.

* * *

Persephone had come again.

She was right on time, dying flowers tucked into her braids, the chill of autumn in her breath. Hades wasn’t there to help her off the train, but that was alright. She didn’t have a lot of bags this year.

Eurydice stands alone on the platform. Her stomach turns over and over, consumed by nerves, and her hands would have been shaking if they weren’t clinging tightly to a torn envelope and its contents. Persephone opens her mouth to call out a greeting but falters when she sees the familiar gleam of a golden ticket.

“He let you go,” she breathes, stepping aside so that Eurydice can step aboard. 

“He let me try,” she answers, unable to stop the grin brimming on her lips. “Did you see Orpheus?”

“They say he comes to town each winter.” The goddess smiles. “You’ll find him.”

The whistle blows, and Persephone blows a kiss to Eurydice as the train takes her farther and farther away from Hadestown. She pulls a shriveled bloom from her pocket. It crumbles in her hands, like it should have years ago, the magic of Hadestown loosening its hold. 

“Wait for me,” Eurydice whispers, letting the remains of the flower drop to the floor. “I’m coming.”


End file.
